As I approached him, I could see his body tense. He looked away from me, shaking his head. My embarrassment grew with every passing moment that he didn’t say anything, that he didn’t reach out to touch me, but I held my ground. “Logan,” I said finally, willing him to look at me. “Logan, please.” His eyes flicked down to mine and I saw a swirl of emotions that I couldn’t quite decipher. “Tell me that I’m not crazy. Kiss me. Touch me. Show me.” I heard my voice crack. “Please.”
When he finally answered, his voice barely above a whisper, there was a shimmer in his eyes that caught in the moonlight. “I can’t.”
I felt my stomach bottom out as I desperately tried to grab hold to any semblance of reason. “You can’t or you won’t?”
His beautiful eyes—rich, dark molasses in the night—were locked on mine. I watched as he inhaled a deep breath and then pushed it out between his lips. But he didn’t say anything.
I felt the unyielding pain of my heart fracturing into a thousand jagged pieces as a furious rage rose up to take its place. Here I was, in this fucking place with him,again.
I could no longer stand to be near him. I couldn’t take him looking at me like he was worried that I was going to break. “Thendon’tdo this to me anymore,” I spit out. I balled my hands into fists to hide the fact that they were shaking as I backed away from him. “This is over for me, Logan. It hurts too damn much, and I can’t do it anymore.” I tried to take control of my emotions, to strain my features into a neutral look to hide the fact that I wasn’t just breaking, I was absolutely shattering.
I turned away from Logan and began walking away, suddenly feeling completely sober. My head throbbed and my whole body was trembling with adrenaline, but my mind was finally clear. “Amelia,” I heard him call out. “Wait . . . please . . .”
Ignoring him, I continued to make my way down along the beach, feeling grounded with the water at my feet. Our rental house was only a mile and a half away from the bar, close enough that I could walk home. It would give me the time I needed to reflect on everything that just happened.
“Amelia, wait!” I heard Logan yell with a firmer voice, but still, I didn’t turn around. I had nothing to give him. Nothing more to say.
Logan was like the tide in the ocean, flowing in and out of my heart throughout the cycles of our lives. Just as his waters reached my shore, smothering me with the beautiful essence of him, he was disappearing again into the wild currents that swept him out to sea. I didn’t know what stopped him from just admitting the way that he felt about me—what I’d known in my gut was true—but I couldn’t keep waiting for him to figure it out. My heart couldn’t tolerate it anymore. So I had to let this go. I had to let him go.
As I made the long walk home, I pretended not to notice Logan trailing behind me the entire way. He kept himself a far enough distance back, but made no efforts to hide the fact that even now, he wasn’t going anywhere.
ChapterTwenty-Nine
As I saton the patio of the apartment in the bitter cold, watching as snowflakes lazily fell across the city, I felt numb. I took a sip of the hot tea from the mug in my hands, barely even registering the burn on my tongue from the scalding liquid. There was a haze on the horizon that mirrored what I felt inside of my soul, a culmination of murky, cloudy shit where something beautiful should have been.
I hadn’t spoken to Logan in two days, and certainly not for a lack of trying. He really hadn’t wanted me to find him—which, quite frankly, devastated me. After I left the apartment the other night, I got in my car and sped over to Logan’s house assuming that he would be there, but he wasn’t. I waited for almost an hour, sitting in my parked car outside of his house, but he never showed.
I’d spent the entire weekend lost in my own madness, taking long car rides by myself through the city, showing up at Logan’s house again and again only to keep finding that his car wasn’t parked in the driveway, and then showing up at the shop to find that he wasn’t there, either; Camila told me he had taken a couple of days off. I called and texted his phone numerous times, but never got an answer. Eventually, calls went straight to voicemail, so it seemed likely that he had turned his phone off.
At home, I avoided Adam as much as I could, and it felt like he was avoiding me, too. We hardly left our rooms when we were both home, neither of us wanting to talk to the other. I felt so incredibly frustrated at how he handled seeing Logan and I together, but a big part of me blamed myself, too.
Adam’s actions may not have been ideal, but I was the one taking the risk having Logan over for dinner. Regardless of if I thought Adam would have been at work or not, he was letting me stay in his home, and I took advantage of his absence to sneak around with his best friend. In those optics, I could understand why Adam would feel hurt and angry with us.
I sighed. My skin was frozen, and I could barely feel the fingers that were wrapped around my mug, but I didn’t care. I welcomed the numbness because it kept me from crying.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to dothis. The thought of my chance with Logan being over, of Logan deciding that this wasn’t worth the risk, cut me to my very core.
But I couldn’t blame him. His lifelong best friend punched him in the face. I knew that Logan was worried about the possibility of losing my family, somehow thinking that he could fuck this up enough that everyone would simply choose to walk away from him.
In his mind, he viewed being with me as a catalyst for the end of everything good in his life. Giving in to the temptation of his true desires, of having me, meant potentially wreaking havoc on the people who had kept him safe and who had supported him for all these years.
Our relationship wasn’t simple. We were so intertwined in each other’s lives already without adding romance to the mix. But that was exactly what we were trying to do, and the minute our feelings for each other reared themselves, we began a slow dance with the devil. And Logan had looked that devil in the eye, thinking that if this didn’t work out the way we hoped it would, he might lose the people he loved most.
I thought I could protect him from that with good my intentions. I thought I could show him that love conquered all, and that my family would never turn their backs on him, evenifhe broke my heart. But I didn’t stop Adam from hitting him, and the guilt of that tore me to pieces. I didn’t protect Logan like I thought I could.
It was almost torture—the need todosomething, to make all of this okay. But with Logan not speaking to me, I didn’t know what to do. I needed to find him so that we could talk about this.
What if he says it's over?
I sunk into myself. If Logan said he doesn’t want to do this anymore, I would have to find a way to be okay with that, even if it killed me. But I owed it to myself—to both of us—to make one last stand. Logan’s fears were getting the best of him, and while that was a dragon he had to slay himself, I could at least try to give him the sword.
The truth was, I didn’t justloveLogan. Love wasn’t a big enough word to describe the way I felt about him. The feelings that I had in my heart for him were well beyond the bounds of reality. Beyond the stretches of an entire ocean.
And nothing was over until you stopped fighting for it.
An hour later,I parked my car on the side of the road in front of Logan’s house. There were no lights shining from the windows, and his car wasn’t parked in the driveway, but I wasn’t giving up so easily this time. Instead of pulling away and driving home, I turned off the ignition and got out of the car.
The sun was still up fairly high in the sky, but it wouldn’t be long before it began to set and the already freezing temperature would drop even further. I tucked myself deeper into my scarf as I began walking up the pathway to Logan’s front porch. There was snow around its edges, but underneath the awning the majority of the porch was clear. So was the porch swing, where I decided to take a seat and wait.
